


the ghost of you, it keeps me awake

by gaygentdanvers



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Angst with a Happy Ending, Artificial Intelligence, F/F, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-13
Updated: 2019-02-18
Packaged: 2019-10-27 06:30:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 19,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17761589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gaygentdanvers/pseuds/gaygentdanvers
Summary: Sam died on a Tuesday in Spring.Sam died on a Tuesday in Spring, and the only thing Alex can remember thinking about clearly was how it was so weird, how sunny it was that day. It didn’t match.It was the wrong kind of weather for something like that, because things like that happen when it’s dark, when it’s pouring down rain, when it’s absolutelymiserableoutside — not on beautiful sunny days accompanied by birds singing and bright green leaves rustling as warm wind blows through the trees.





	1. so much for breathing [my cloud nine fell from grace]

**Author's Note:**

> so this fic is heavily inspired by the podcast lif-e af/ter, and while you don't need to listen to it in order to understand what's going on (since all of it will be explained eventually) i still highly recommend it because it's, quite frankly, fucking amazing. for all my sci-fi/mystery/suspense fans out there. 
> 
> also, the timeline here is a bit different than it is in the show. alex meets sam after she and maggie have already broken off their engagement, and they've already known each other and been together for a few years before the whole reign ordeal.

there isn’t a moment of any sane day    
when i do not feel you loving and glowing,    
when i do not grieve for you, for me,    
for us both, my sweetheart,    
when i do not long to be with you    
as deep as the sea.   
  
— dylan thomas, from a letter to caitlin thomas,    
written c. march 1950.

  
  


* * *

  
  
They say addicts tell themselves all kinds of stories to justify their actions. They’ll tell themselves things like, “ _I’ll fix just one more time, then I’ll stop,”_ or “ _I can definitely afford to spend this money,”_ or “ _I can definitely do my job high,”_ despite knowing deep down that it isn’t true, even if they do somehow manage to convince themselves and others that it is. They will go to great lengths in order to get their next fix, even going so far as to risk their own life, just for that _one_ _last_ drink, that _one_ _last_ injection, that _one last_ feeling of pure relief. _  
_ _  
  
_Alex Danvers has never thought of herself as an addict.  
  
  
Sure, she might have had a slight drinking problem back in grad school, and okay, so maybe she had experienced with speed and LSD a few times back then, too, just to escape the problems plaguing her at the time. But throughout the entire thirty-two years of her life so far, she’s never quite thought of herself as having ever met the criteria in order to qualify as an _addict_.   
  
  
Until now.   
  
  
It’s almost crazy, Alex thinks one day. There are earbuds in her ears, and she is sitting behind her desk at work, and she can only truly breathe again once Sam’s voice filters through the earphones and fills her chest with a sort of warmth that she’s been missing for months. Without Sam’s voice, there is only a numb coldness that invades every part of her, creeping into her body and burying itself in her bones.   
  
  
But just like every drug, there are negative effects too.   
  
  
As soon as she hears Sam’s voice again, there is a weight that lifts off her shoulders, and yet at the same time, a heavier one settles on her chest. It pushes down, down, down, until it nearly squeezes the life out of her, and the irony of this is that she almost cannot breathe again.   
  
  
In some kind of fucked up, twisted prank played on her by the universe, the same thing that gives her air also takes it away, and yet Alex cannot stop.   
  
  
She skips through the podcast. Snippets of Sam’s voice flickers on and off as she fast-forwards, before Alex comes to an abrupt stop at her favorite part, the part she practically has memorized after listening to it so many times.   
  
  
_“—so, I need to get something off my chest, you guys… Remember the hot FBI agent I had met a few months ago, the one I called Agent Hotpants? The one my daughter plowed into at the waterfront? I know all my dedicated listeners will remember_ that _embarrassing story in one of my episodes earlier this year.”_  
  
  
Sam chuckles as she says it, an embarrassed, only slightly self-deprecating laugh that makes Alex’s chest tighten and her throat close up. Every time she listens, she can never quite get used to hearing Sam’s laugh through the speakers and realizing it’s the only way she can ever experience it again.  
  
  
 _“Uh, so, yeah. As it turns out, my daughter happens to be a pretty_ awesome _matchmaker. I raised a good one, guys. Seriously.”_ _  
_ _  
  
_Alex leans back in her chair. She’s alone in her office, but if she shuts her eyes and pretends hard enough, she can almost feel Sam there with her, grinning at her from across the desk. Eyes crinkled at the edges, hair falling loosely past her shoulders, sleeves of her blazer pushed up to her elbows and chin resting on her fist. Alex can imagine her face, bottom lip pulled nervously between her teeth as she watches Alex listen to her podcast.  
  
  
That had been her face the first time Alex had heard this particular episode. She’d been staring at Alex with wide eyes the whole time, trying to gauge her reaction, staying deathly silent until Alex finally pulled the earphones out one by one and dropped them onto the table.   
  
  
“Well?” Sam had asked her, practically vibrating in her seat with nervous and excited energy.  
  
  
Alex had pursed her lips. It’d been hard trying to keep her smile at bay, especially feeling as happy as she did in that moment. It’d been the first time Sam had really acknowledged that there was something going on between them, something serious enough to announce to the thousands of listeners that tuned into her podcast every Thursday.   
  
  
“Well, I think you need to change the theme of your podcast,” is all Alex had said, reaching over and grabbing Sam’s hand. It was warm in her own, and their fingers locked together perfectly. “I mean, since you’re no longer a single mother, you know.”   
  
  
Sam’s face had lit up with a breathtaking smile, then, and Alex can’t quite remember a time when she had seen anything more beautiful.  
  
  
“ _And Ruby just adores her, which is a miracle in itself. Honestly, guys, I can’t remember the last time Ruby took to someone as easily as she took to Alex. It’s almost like it’s too good to be—”_ _  
_ _  
  
_A loud bang makes Alex jump in her seat, hand automatically reaching down for her gun. But it’s only Colonel Haley, standing in the doorway of Alex’s office with her hands clasped behind her back, eyebrows furrowed and lips pursed.  
  
  
Alex discreetly pulls an earbud from her ear, straightening up in her chair. “Colonel Haley,” she addresses her politely. _  
__  
  
_“Director Danvers,” Haley greets with a stern nod, dark eyes trained intensely on Alex like a hawk. “I hope you’ve had the chance to look over the files on the rogue Infernian that the DEO has yet to detain. As you know, we need to get ahead of this before more chaos breaks out in this city.”  
  
  
Alex blinks. When she looks over at her computer, she can see the file tab at the bottom of the screen, still unopened. When did that get there?   
  
  
“No, I haven’t looked over it yet. I only just received the files a few minutes ago—”  
  
  
“Director Danvers, I sent them to you two hours ago,” Haley cuts her off, tone sharp.   
  
  
Two hours… Time really flies when Alex is listening to her.   
  
  
Alex swallows hard, paling slightly as she glances down at her phone. Sam’s _Single Mothers Survival Guide_ podcast is still playing, thankfully unable to be heard by Haley through the earbuds. “No, yes, of course. I’m sorry, Colonel Haley. I’ve just been…” She trails off, swallowing back the excuse and shaking her head. “I promise, it won’t happen again.”   
  
  
“It better not,” Haley tells her, before turning around once Alex has saluted her. It only lasts a second, though, before she’s turning back, leaning through the doorway slightly and sighing.   
  
  
“Director Danvers, you may not know this but I _am_ aware of what happened here in National City before I arrived, and I could understand why you’ve been distracted at work. But lets remember, it has been eight months, and you are the director of a government agency. Now if you can’t handle this job without slacking off—”  
  
  
“I can,” Alex interrupts harshly, rising from her chair, suddenly defensive. “I can handle it. I take this job very seriously, and I am damn good at it. You don’t need to worry about that.”   
  
  
Colonel Haley stares her down for a moment, eyes narrowed. Alex stares right back, hands on her hips, until Haley nods slowly. “Okay then. I hope not, Director.”   
  
  
Then she’s gone. As soon as the door shuts behind her, Alex nearly collapses back into her chair, breathing out slowly. Colonel Haley’s words are stuck in her brain, and she grips the edge of her desk hard enough to turn her knuckles white. She’s been hearing that a lot lately. Too much.   
  
  
_Eight months._  
  
  
  


* * *

 

  
“Eight months!”   
  
  
Lucy’s voice carries easily over the loud bustle of the alien bar, hand slapping against the sticky bar as she leans out of her seat towards Alex. Her eyes are already bloodshot, cheeks flushed pink, clearly inebriated. Alex has just gotten here a few minutes ago, and she has no idea how many shots her friend has had tonight already.   
  
  
“Right,” she grunts out, crossing her arms. Her heart aches at the reminder, but Lucy is too drunk to notice. Alex tries to focus on anything else; the clanking of billiard balls, the drunken rants of a man sitting a few stools away, the rowdy, boisterous laughing of a group standing over by the jukebox.  
  
  
“Look, Danvers,” Lucy says. Despite her drunken state, she barely slurs her words at all, well-equipped at hiding the fact that she’s had one too many drinks. “I know it’s crass to just shout it out like that. But what I’m trying to say here is that eight months is… it’s an acceptable period of time for...” She gestures around wildly, nearly spilling the drink in her hand. “No one would blame you if you, you know, got back out there.”   
  
  
Got back out there, Lucy says. As in, getting back into the dating field. Getting back into one night stands. Getting back into serious relationships with people who are not Sam.  
  
  
There’s a thick lump in Alex’s throat. She swallows past it. Her fingers itch to reach into her jacket pocket and pull out her earbuds again, to slip them in and shut her eyes, to imagine Sam sitting right next to her. She aches for it, one part of her mind barely processing Lucy’s words while the other part focuses solely on the thought of getting back home in order to get her next fix once again.   
  
  
“Hey!” Lucy is snapping her fingers in front of Alex’s face, head tilted disapprovingly. “Alex. You still there?”   
  
  
Alex rolls her eyes. She smacks Lucy’s hand away harshly, ignoring the annoying grin her friend flashes her way as she takes another long sip of her whiskey. She relishes in the way it burns down her throat, filling her chest with the kind of warmth that can only come from good alcohol.   
  
  
“Lucy, I’m not— I’m just not ready yet, okay?” she insists, shifting in her seat uncomfortably. The leather on the old, worn barstool is starting to peel off, and she picks at it idly, avoiding Lucy’s piercing gaze.   
  
  
Somewhere in the back of the bar, a shot glass crashes to the floor, and two drunken laughs ring out.

  
Lucy sits back, huffing almost indignantly. Then her expression changes suddenly, morphing into something more sympathetic, and she sighs quietly as she stirs her drink around with her straw. “I know it’s hard,” she says, looking up. “I do. I’m just trying to help you, Alex, really.”    
  
  
Alex nods. She knows that, knows that Lucy is only trying to push her towards moving on, like everyone else is, but it still feels wrong. She feels wrong just  _ looking  _ at another woman who isn’t Sam, despite her wife not being here to disapprove.    
  
  
“There’s someone I want you should meet. Her name is Kelly, she’s James’s sister.” Before Alex can protest, Lucy continues quickly, holding a hand up. “It doesn’t have to be a  _ date  _ date if you don’t want it to be. Just have coffee with her. She’s gone through the same thing you have—” At Alex’s disbelieving look, she rolls her eyes and adds, “Okay, so maybe not  _ exactly _ what you have _ ,  _ but she gets it, alright?”    
  
  
“But—”   
  
  
“No buts,” Lucy interjects, reaching over to press an unwanted finger against Alex’s lips to shut her up. “You’re meeting her for coffee. I’ll give her your number, okay? Who knows, you two might even end up becoming friends.”    
  
  
“Do I at least have any say in this?” Alex asks, despite already knowing the answer.    
  
  
Confirming her suspicions, Lucy shakes her head, sipping through her straw and looking up at Alex over the rim of her glass. “Nope!”   
  
  
It’s only three agonizing hours later that Alex drags herself through the door to her apartment. She’s tipsy but not as drunk as she’d like to be, but that’s not the thing she’s craving most right now.    
  
  
Right now, all she wants is to hear Sam’s voice again, and she almost can’t slip her earbuds in fast enough before pressing play on a random episode, one uploaded a few months after she and Sam officially got married.    
  
  
_ “Welcome back, everyone! So, I’m going to go ahead and start off by saying that this episode is going to be a little different today. I know, I know, my audience is mostly single mothers. However, I would like you all to know that… getting a partner? Yeah, doesn’t always make raising a kid any easier. Don’t get me wrong, Alex is amazing. She’s so good with Ruby, better than I ever expected from anyone, and getting things done around the house is certainly easier, but…”  _ _   
_ _   
  
_ Sam blows out a harsh breath. Without noticing, Alex’s fingernails dig into her palms, and she rests her elbows on her knees as Sam continues on with her rant.   
  
  
_ “Ruby got into a fight today. I honestly don’t even know what had gotten into her, because she wouldn’t talk to me about it. Now, as her mother, I’m supposed to keep her  _ out _ of trouble. And trust me, I tried. I sat her down and we had a long talk about how violence is bad and why she shouldn’t use her fists to solve problems, and I even did the one thing I don’t normally do. I grounded her.”  _   
  
  
Alex remembers that. Ruby had still been twelve at the time, and she had punched a girl in the face at school because the girl had said something to Ruby about how having two moms wasn’t natural. When Alex found out, she’d been nothing short of a proud parent, but Sam had felt much differently.    
  
  
_ “And what did  _ Alex  _ do? Well, Alex gave her a high five. Which, okay,  _ not  _ cool.”  _  Sam scoffs, and Alex can just imagine her expression. “ _ Oh, and honey? I know you listen to these. If you’re listening in right now, just know that you’re sleeping on the couch tonight.”  _   
  
  
Alex chuckles despite herself, because she remembers the way Sam had looked after she and Ruby had high fived. With her eyes narrowed and arms crossed, she’d looked over at Alex incredulously, shaking her head in disbelief.    
  
  
Alex  _ had  _ ended up sleeping on the couch that night, but it only lasted a few short hours before Sam had crept down the stairs in the middle of the night, careful not to wake Ruby, pulling her into a warm hug and assuring her that she could come back upstairs to sleep in their actual bed.  _   
_ _   
  
_ “I haven’t slept without you beside me in years,” she had said softly, quietly, the whisper tickling Alex’s skin as she pressed her lips against her cheek. “I’m not going to start now.”    
  
  
There’s a sharp pang in Alex’s chest; that’s one of the last memories she has of Sam, before everything started to go downhill.    
  
  
_ “So… yeah. Having help? Not always as glorious as it seems.”  _ Sam keeps talking in her ear, the audio crackling slightly.  _ “But full disclosure?”  _ _   
_ _   
  
_ She pauses for a moment for something like suspense, and Alex holds her breath as if she hasn’t already heard this a thousand times before, over and over, repeating the same part until she eventually falls asleep with her earbuds still in and Sam’s voice in her head.    
  
  
“ _ Full disclosure, I wouldn’t change it for the world.”  _ _   
_ _   
  
_ She replays it again, just as she does every time.    
  
  
And again.  _   
_ _   
  
_ And again.   
  
  


 

* * *

_   
  
_ _   
_ Sam died on a Tuesday in Spring.   


  
Sam died on a Tuesday in Spring, and the only thing Alex can remember thinking about clearly was how it was so _weird_ , how sunny it was that day; it didn’t match.  
  
  
It was the wrong kind of weather for something like that, because things like that happen when it’s dark, when it’s pouring down rain, when it’s absolutely _miserable_ outside — not on beautiful sunny days accompanied by birds singing and bright green leaves rustling as warm wind blows through the trees.  
  
  
The day was beautiful and it didn’t match the horrible, aching, _agonizing_ grief that Alex felt that day, watching Sam fall.  
  
  
The cloudless, clear blue sky didn’t match the battle going down underneath it, a blur of red and blue mixing with a blur of pure black, the violent clashing of the two people Alex loves more than anything.  
  
  
Other than that, Alex can’t quite remember, personally, any other details about that day. Her mind has blocked it out, repressed it, in order to keep her from going completely mad with grief — but she still knows from other accounts. Lena tells her what happened, sometimes, whenever she’s so drunk that she can’t help but ask, even though she knows her sober-self doesn’t want to know the answer. 

  
She knows that she had run into the rubble after Reign fell, after Kara had finally defeated the Worldkiller and, therefore, defeated Sam.   
  
  
She knows that by the time she made it over the debris, by the time all the dust and smoke had cleared, by the time she reached the spot where Sam had fallen, her wife was nowhere to be found.   
  
  
She knows that they’d searched the rubble for hours upon hours, coming up with nothing. Alex had hoped for a time that that meant there was a chance Sam could still be alive, hoped that not finding a body was all the evidence they needed to prove that her wife wasn’t truly gone forever, that she could still be somewhere, hiding out. Recovering, maybe.   
  
  
It only took a few more days and the eventual discovery of Reign’s mask, cracked nearly in half and stained with blood that could’ve only come from a Kryptonian who blew their powers completely, that any and all spark of hope Alex had felt was extinguished.   
  
  
Lena tells her that Kara had flown her away from the site when the discovery was made, all the way back to her apartment.   
  
  
Alex doesn’t remember any of it.  
  
  
She does remember sleeping for days, though. It would be a slow process of opening her eyes for the day; every muscle in her body screamed and every bone felt like it was on the verge of turning to powder, bruised and aching. Her chest felt heavy with grief, and there was a fog in her brain that she knew would not lift anytime soon.   
  
  
Each and every morning she woke up, there were always a few perfect seconds when she forgot about everything that happened, listening to the sounds of the city outside. She would roll over in bed and take the blanket with her, and then she would expect to hear Sam’s voice from behind her, scolding her about hogging the covers as she pulls the blanket back over her own body.  
  
  
 _“Stop being selfish,”_ she’d say, huffing out a laugh as she yanked the blanket from Alex’s grip. _“Sharing is caring.”  
  
  
_ Alex would only scoff, not bothering to look over at her, _“So?”  
  
  
_ _"So,”_ Sam would say, dragging out the ‘O’ and smacking at Alex’s arm, “ _you should care about your wife being cold, you asshole.”  
  
  
_ That is what she expected to wake up to.  
  
  
But instead, each and every morning, Alex would only be met with agonizing silence, until suddenly she would remember with a painful jolt that— _oh_.  
  
  
Right.  
  
  
It wouldn’t take long after that for everything that’s happened to come crashing over her all over again; she would feel a lot of things, then, but the feeling of grief would preside over all others. It would build up in her chest, wrapping tightly around her ribs and threatening to squeeze her heart to bits with each slow, deep breath she took.  
  
  
Even now, eight months later, Alex’s mornings still start like that, sometimes.  
  
  
Eight months later and she still wakes up thinking, if only for a fleeting moment, that it’s still years before the Worldkillers and her wife will be safe and alive next to her, before the smoke clears from the mirrors and she’s back to being alone in her bed, the sheets next to her body as cold and empty as she feels inside.

  
  


* * *

  
  


“I’m going to be late to Game Night tonight,” Kara says from the bathroom early one morning after Ruby’s already left for school, the words slightly muffled by the toothbrush in her mouth.    
  
  
“What is it now?” Alex calls back over her shoulder, before pulling out the milk from the fridge and kicking the door closed.    
  
  
“Snapper is insisting I finish my article on the train that derailed late last night so not only do I have to stay late, Lena asked me over to her penthouse to have a talk. What does  _ ‘have a talk’ _ even mean?” Kara asks, voice sounding like desperate whining by the time she finishes.    
  
  
“It means she’s finally going to tell you that she’s deeply in love with you after all these years.”    
  
  
“ _ Alex _ ,” Kara squeals loudly. “Don’t say things like that! Lena and I are just friends.”    
  
  
She comes out of the bathroom just as Alex is pouring the milk into two glasses, and her sister scrunches up her nose. “That milk is expired,” she says, pointing at the date at the top of the carton. Alex grimaces, watching as Kara pours the milk down the sink and grabs orange juice instead. “When was the last time you went grocery shopping?”    
  
  
Alex rolls her eyes, ignoring the way the question hurts more than it should; Sam had always been the one to go grocery shopping, so long as Alex took care of tasks like the laundry and dishes. They had a system like that, and it worked for them.    
  
  
She shrugs, deflecting the question with a joke. “Who needs groceries when I can just order takeout?”    
  
  
“Alex,” Kara chastises, before sliding the glass of orange juice across the island. Alex catches it before it slides right off the counter and crashes to the floor, the juice sloshing against the sides of the glass. “Promise me you’ll go today. I don’t need my sister and her step-daughter living off of pizza, stale beer, and expired milk.”    
  
  
“Uh— As far as Ruby is concerned, eating pizza for dinner every night is basically heaven,” Alex argues, pointing at Kara with raised eyebrows as she rounds the island.    
  
  
“Yeah, but Ruby is a sixteen year old  _ growing  _ kid. She needs more than just pizza to eat everyday.”    
  
  
“You’re one to talk, considering all the potstickers you eat in a day,” Alex retorts. Kara only rolls her eyes, hands dropping down to her hips in her infamous Supergirl-pose. She only stops once Alex flashes her a reassuring smile and agrees to go shopping that afternoon, and silence settles between them for a few seconds before Kara speaks up again, hesitant.    
  
  
“How  _ is  _ Ruby?” she asks, fidgeting with her glasses and frowning.    
  
  
Alex sets her glass down, leaning against the counter and crossing her arms. “She’s good,” she answers, nodding slowly. “I mean, as good as she can be, considering…”    
  
  
Kara nods. “Yeah,” she agrees solemnly.    
  
  
“But, no, really,” Alex assures, “she’s good. She got principal's list last quarter, all A’s. She’s doing really well in school. A lot better than I did, when Dad died.”    
  
  
The mention of her father doesn’t hurt as much anymore. Mostly, it had dulled down to a slight twinge in her chest each time she spoke about him, but she’s had a lot of time to process it. By now it’s nothing compared to the pain she feels when she thinks about Sam.    
  
  
“Does she ever… listen to them?”    
  
  
Kara means the podcasts, Alex knows. She shakes her head. “No. She won’t.”    
  
  
They fall silent again after that, until Alex’s watch alarm goes off and she has to leave for work. She lets Kara press a kiss against her forehead before she leaves her sister’s apartment, bracing herself against the frigid air as she heads towards her bike in the lot.    
  
  
  


* * *

 

  
_ “Welcome back, everyone! So, yeah, today’s topic is going to be pretty heavy, so be warned. Earlier this morning, I had been digging around in the attic for some of Ruby’s old art projects. Kindergarten finger paintings, summer camp macaroni art, you guys know the deal. And it just hit me. My kid is growing up. Soon she’ll be moving out, going to college. She won’t need her mom around anymore. I won’t need to be there to raise her anymore, or _ — _ ” _ _   
_ _   
  
_ Alex switches to a different episode before Sam can even finish her sentence.    
  
  


 

* * *

  
She finally meets with the woman Lucy had told her about after work on a Friday evening. Noonan’s is busier than expected when she finally arrives, ten minutes later than the agreed upon time. It isn’t her fault but the traffic of National City’s, and she rushes inside to find the woman she assumes to be Kelly waving her over, sat at a table in the back corner of the restaurant.    
  
  
“Hey! Alexandra, right?” Kelly checks as she rises from her seat, holding her hand out. Alex shakes it before taking her own seat across the table.    
  
  
“Just Alex,” she corrects automatically. Kelly nods, smiling warmly at her. “Alex Danvers.”   
  
  
“Kelly Olsen. Lucy and James told me all about you.”    
  
  
Alex smiles, mostly to be polite than anything else. While Kelly seems like a nice person, and she certainly is pretty, as Lucy had very unsubtly hinted to her way too many times, all Alex wants to do is go home.    
  
  
She orders her coffee. Black, with two creams and three sugars, just like Sam used to take it each morning.    
  
  
“Listen, Alex, this may be a bit awkward, but I just want to get this out of the way before anything else. You probably know this already, but Lucy also explained to me ahead of time what happened, and… I just want to say that I’m so sorry.”    
  
  
Kelly’s hand reaches across the table in a show of comfort, unfamiliar fingertips brushing against Alex’s knuckles, and Alex resists the urge to yank her hand away on instinct.    
  
  
Instead she schools her expression to remain calm. Unphased. Like Kelly said, she’d already known Lucy had debriefed her date-not-date on the tragic news of her wife. She even knows Lucy’s cover story, that Sam had died in a car accident and not as a Worldkiller during a battle with Supergirl; she’d been the one to give Lucy the fake story to tell Kelly in the first place. She doesn’t want Reign to be the thing Sam is remembered for.   
  
  
“And I— I can’t help but notice, you know,” Kelly continues carefully, voice almost hesitant, her other hand gesturing towards Alex’s hand on the table. Alex’s stomach clenches. “Your wedding ring, you still…”    
  
  
_ You still wear it.  _ The words remain left unsaid, seeming to die on Kelly’s tongue, but Alex hears the rest anyways. It’s been pointed out by too many people, too many times, but it doesn’t deter her from wearing it. If anything, it only makes her more stubborn, taking it off only when she goes out in the field.   


  
She twists the gold band around her finger. Engraved on the inside is the date of their wedding, and Alex’s heart aches behind her ribs.    
  
  
“Yeah, I… I just can’t, uh…” Her phone is suddenly heavy in her back pocket, holding the weight of everything Alex needs to at least pretend that things are okay again. Her hand gravitates towards her jacket pocket, where her earbuds are tucked carefully inside, but she doesn’t take them out.    
  
  
_ Addict,  _ her mind screams.  _ Addict, addict, addict. _   
  
  
“You don’t have to explain,” Kelly reassures her. “It was the same for me and my ex-wife before the divorce papers were finalized.”    
  
  
Alex’s eyes dart up. This time she is surprised. “Lucy said—”    
  
  
“Yeah,” Kelly cuts her off, exhaling deeply. She lays her hands in her lap under the table, looking sheepish. “It’s amazing how many people think getting a divorce and your…  _ situation _ , are even remotely the same.”    
  
  
She clears her throat awkwardly, and Alex takes a sip of her coffee, needing something to distract herself. It’s much too sweet for her taste and she cringes in disgust, but she doesn’t bother changing her order, opting instead to push through it.    
  
  
“So, you work for the DEO?” Kelly asks suddenly, thankfully quick to change the subject. At Alex’s next shocked expression, she explains, “My brother is best friends with Superman himself, so yes, I do happen to know about the DEO.”    
  
  
Relief flows through her.  _ This—  _ this Alex can talk about with ease, and she does. She explains to Kelly what her job as Director is like, and about how J’onn recruited her and helped her become the person she is today, and about what it’s like working with Kara, and it’s  _ easy _ .    
  
  
It’s easy, talking about her job and her mentor and her sister. She learns things about Kelly too, like the fact that she was in the military for ten years, and how she secretly hated Clark when he and James first became friends, but then started to warm up to him when he saved James’s life as Superman more times than she could count.   
  
  
It’s well into the night when they finally decide to go their separate ways. Alex walks Kelly back to her car, and Kelly leans up against the door before she climbs in, looking up at Alex with soft eyes.    
  
  
“Well, I guess we’ll see each other again. Through James and Lucy,” she says. “It really was nice to finally meet you. You have a good night, Alex.”    
  
  
Alex nods. She twirls her wedding ring absently around her finger. “Yeah, you two,” she agrees, stepping back as Kelly climbs into the car and starts the ignition.    
  
  
Alex is about to turn away when the window rolls down, and Kelly sticks her head out. “Hey, Alex, wait. I know the situation with my ex-wife is different, but _ — _ I don’t know if James ever told you _ —  _ we lost a sister a few years back. Cancer. And with all my years in the military, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I do know what it’s like to lose someone, to lose  _ people _ . So if you ever need to talk…”    
  
  
Alex’s tongue darts out to wet her lips nervously. She shifts, hesitating, before letting herself nod. “Yeah,” she agrees. “Yeah, okay.”   
  
  
As soon as the car pulls out of the parking lot, Alex is reaching into her pocket to grab her phone, and she can finally breathe again. She clicks on her favorite episode, reveling in the sound of Sam’s voice, in her laugh, in her overall presence.    
  
  
  


* * *

  
The next morning, she manages to busy herself with work-outs and even does some paperwork through the entire morning before finally getting the chance to relax in her bedroom. Immediately, she logs into her account and searches for Sam’s podcast— but it doesn’t show up.  
  
  
Alex frowns. She clears the search bar and types in Sam’s profile name, but nothing comes up except a blank white screen with a grey frowny face, and then there’s an automated voice in her ear, saying something that immediately sends Alex into a panic.  
  
  
 **Profile not found.  
  
  
** No. That’s not right. That _can’t_ be right, it was just there last night. She was listening to it just before she fell asleep.   
  
  
She tries it again, fingers shaking slightly as she retypes Sam’s name in, but it only produces the same results. Alex’s entire body feels cold, chilled to the bone, as she stares at the daunting frowny face on the screen, the emoticon seeming to exist solely to mock her. Her heart drops into her stomach, her breath coming out in quick, harsh gasps as she paces the length of the bedroom.   
  
  
**Profile not found.** **  
**  
  
When she goes to her phone library and checks the few episodes of Sam’s podcast that she had downloaded to her phone, they aren’t there either, and that’s when the panic really begins to set in.  
  
  
“Fuck!” The word slips out on accident, louder than intended, so loud that Ruby pokes her head into the room. She looks on in concern as Alex tries another feeble attempt to bring up Sam’s profile, to no avail.  
  
  
 **Profile not found.**  
  
  
“No, no, no,” she mutters, voice trembling. “ _Fuck_.”   
  
  
Sam’s profile is gone. Every saved, downloaded file. Her whole podcast, each and every episode, gone.   
  
  
Just like Sam herself. _Gone_.  
  
  
“Alex?” Ruby calls out, but Alex barely hears her, her mind racing. She can feel tears pricking her eyes, hot and burning, but she can hardly care as she rushes to dial the number for the company Sam’s podcast was uploaded to, her hands shaking.   
  
  
“Hello, you are currently speaking to an automated customer service representative. How can I help you? For bills and payments, press one. If there is a problem with your profile, press two. For all other questions, say _operator_.”   
  
  
“Operator,” Alex says.   
  
  
“What’s going on?” Ruby asks her, stepping inside the room. She’s ready for school, dressed with her bag slung over her shoulder, her own phone in hand. “Are you—”  
  
  
“I’m sorry,” the automated voice says, completely monotone, “I didn’t quite catch that.”   
  
  
“Operator!” she repeats, just as Ruby calls out, “Alex?”   
  
  
“Please hold while I transfer you to an operator.” Classical music rings out from the speakers, and Alex paces around the room impatiently until there’s a dial tone and a woman’s cheery voice greets her over the line. “Hello, this is Erin, what can I help you with today?”   
  
  
Alex almost collapses in relief. “Are you the right person to talk to if an account is down?”  
  
  
“Well, if I can’t help you then I’ll be happy to reroute you to someone who can. If you’re having problems with a profile—”  
  
  
Alex can’t help but interrupt, already frustrated. “No, I don’t want to be rerouted, I just want an  account restored. I’m calling about my wife’s profile, her name was Samantha Arias and she had a podcast and now it’s gone. I still pay for the membership every month, so there should be no reason that it’s been terminated.”  
  
  
“Wait, this is about _Mom?”_ Ruby demands, her voice a shrill cry. She walks up and grabs at Alex’s arm, trying to look at her. “What are you—”  
 _  
  
_“Ruby, fuck, I’m on the phone!” Alex snaps, turning to face the teenager. Ruby stumbles back and stares at her, surprised, eyes widening slightly as the grip on her arm loosens. Alex knows she shouldn’t have yelled; she’s never yelled like that at Ruby before, even after the kid has gotten into some trouble, but she’s too high-strung to stop herself.  
  
  
“I’m sorry,” she says, immediately filled with regret. She steps closer, shaking her head. “Hey, kiddo, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell like that.”   
  
  
Ruby is frowning at her. She looks so much like Sam now that she’s gotten older, more than she ever has before. “What are you doing?” she asks, her voice impossibly quiet. She looks so vulnerable, eyes shiny at the reminder of her mother.   
  
  
Alex hesitates. Ruby knows about Sam’s podcast, of course she does. What she doesn’t know is that Alex has been listening to it almost every minute of every day since Sam’s death, and she won’t understand why Alex is as hysteric as she is right now over the fact that it’s suddenly gone.   
  
  
“Your mom,” she starts. Her voice cracks, and she clears her throat, setting the phone down. She can still hear the operator through the speaker, asking her for her name, asking if she’s still there. “Your mom’s podcast was taken down, and I’m just— I’m just trying to get it back.”   
  
  
Ruby’s expression changes almost immediately. Going from confused, to surprise, before finally settling on a look of pure anguish. Alex’s heart clenches in her chest at the sight, and Ruby’s voice trembles as she asks, “You still listen to her?”   
  
  
Alex nods. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, Ruby, I do.”   
  
_  
“Hello?”_ a voice crackles from the phone. _“Miss, are you there? Miss?”_ _  
_ _  
_  
For a few long moments, Ruby stays silent, thinking. Alex watches her eyes drift over towards her phone, still open on the bed, and her frown only deepens. “Is that it?” she asks, pointing towards the screen. “That’s her podcast?”  
  
  
But Alex is too distracted to process Ruby’s question, because she’s too focused on the screen, on the big, grinning profile picture of her wife on the top, with a list of podcast episodes below it.   
  
  
It’s back as though it was never gone in the first place. Fully restored, every episode even saved back onto Alex’s own personal library.   
  
  
She tries out an episode, just to make sure, and sure enough: 

_  
“So, I need to get something off my chest, you guys. Remember the hot FBI agent I had met a few months ago, the one I called Agent Hotpants?”  _ _   
_ _   
  
_ Alex can’t do anything but sink down onto her bed and cry in relief.     
  
  
  


* * *

  
  


If anyone had ever asked her before if she believed in fate, Alex would say no in a heartbeat.   
  
  
She’s a scientist, after all. She’s always been a natural skeptic, just like her parents were. 

  
Back in school, she had learned that in quantum mechanics, according to the uncertainty principle, the momentum and position of a particle cannot both be precisely determined at the same time. But observations, or the slightest actions or interference, could cause the incredibly small particles to behave differently. Meaning people’s choices always affect their outcomes.   
  
  
Life was unpredictable and nothing, Alex had decided early on, was predetermined.  
  
  
After meeting Sam at the waterfront, her answer changed.  
  
  
Meeting Sam seemed too good to be true. Since her break-up with Maggie, she’d gotten into listening to Sam’s podcast for new single mothers, eventually falling in love with it. She looked forward to every episode, even going so far to push back Game Nights and Sister Nights an hour later just to listen to it as soon as it had been uploaded.  
  
  
She’d binged the entire thing after the revelation of just how badly she wanted a kid came to light, and she’d quickly learned that Sam actually _helped_. The advice she gave, while not always flattering, like the one episode about how to take care of toddlers  with the flu, helped Alex in more ways than she could describe. Listening to Sam’s struggles and advice and knowing how many fans the woman’s podcast had, she knew she wasn’t alone.   
  
  
Then Ruby ran into her at the waterfront.  
  
  
If it was anyone else, Alex might’ve brushed it off as pure coincidence. After all, things like this don’t just _happen,_ people don’t meet just because the universe says they’re meant to. Things happen solely because of chance or even just luck. Things happen because of the choices that lead them there.   
  
  
But Alex refuses to believe that _chance_ is the thing that brought Sam into her life that day. Her disbelief at the time had only grown when she found out that Sam had moved to National City in order to take over L-Corp, and just so happened to be old acquaintances with Lena fucking Luthor, her sister’s _best friend_ , of all people.   
  
  
So no, she did not believe this was a simple coincidence that lead to them both crashing into each other’s lives.   
  
  
And neither did Sam. Alex found that out on their wedding day, standing before her as she read her vows. There were tears pooling in her eyes, smile never once leaving her face throughout the entire ceremony, and her hands shook with nerves ever so slightly as she read from the folded up piece of paper she’d tucked into the breast pocket of her tux.   
  
  
“I feel like I was meant to love you forever,” she had said that day, almost so quiet that Alex was the only one to hear it. “I feel like this was always where I was supposed to end up, no matter what.”   
  
  
Alex almost couldn’t believe the universe could be so kind to her, to grant her this.   
  
  
Years later, she would be taking that statement back. After Reign, the thought of everything that happened to them having already been predetermined no longer seemed as much of a blessing as it did on that particular day.   
  
  
And it will haunt her until the day she dies, Alex knows. The question of _why_.  
  


 

* * *

  
  


The clanking of silverware is loud in Alex’s ears, a pop-rock song from the 80’s playing from the old radio behind the diner bar. She can’t help but feel slightly nervous as she waits in one of the booths next to the large diner window, tapping her fingers against the table. A simple black coffee sits in front of her, untouched, wisps of grey steam still rising from the mug.   
  
  
Alex’s eyes shoot up when the door to the diner opens with the loud ring of the bell and a gust of wind. Kelly walks in and spots her immediately, heading towards the table.   
  
  
“Honestly, I’ve gotta admit,” Kelly says as she sits down across from her, flagging down a waitress to take her coffee order. “I’m really glad you took up my offer of meeting again.”   
  
  
“Yeah, well,” Alex shrugs. The truth is she had nothing better to do, and Kara had managed to convince her that this would be good for her, somehow.  
  
  
“I hope this isn’t too weird for you,” Kelly admits, watching Alex closely. “You know, meeting to talk about…”  
  
  
“About the deaths of our loved ones?” Alex finishes for her. She taps harder on the table. “Yeah, no, trust me. Not the weirdest thing I’ve done.”  
  
  
Kelly laughs at that. “Well, I’d certainly like to hear about that sometime,” she teases, right as the waitress brings her coffee back. Alex watches her quietly as she picks up the mug with both hands and cups it, almost like she’s trying to warm them, before blowing on it. “But that’s not what we’re here to talk about, right?”   
  
  
“No, it isn’t,” Alex answers, shifting in her seat. “You didn’t have to do this though, you know that, right?”   
  
  
Kelly shrugs a shoulder, looking out the window. “After our sister died, James insisted that I talk to someone about it. I refused for a while, but gave in eventually just to shut him up, and I learned that it _did_ help, even if I tried to deny it at first. He’s the reason I was able to accept it and move on. So I figured, why not try and do the same for you? Besides, even if someone who cared about you tried to force you to do this anyways, it’s better me than some cheap therapist who doesn’t get what it’s like to actually lose someone, right?”   
  
  
Alex can’t help but agree. But, “Honestly? My sister kind of had to talk me into even coming here today.”   
  
  
“Yeah, I get that. Your sister is Kara, right? James has talked about her to me before.”  
  
  
Alex nods. “Two months after Sam died, she sent me a link to this bereavement thing. Some kind of forum that my mom had found after my dad died when I was younger.” She blows out a harsh breath, the action puffing out her cheeks, and shakes her head. “Scrolling through it was…”   
  
  
“Emotionally taxing?” Kelly supplies when she trails off, flashing a sympathetic smile.   
  
  
She sighs, relieved. Finally, somebody gets it. “Yes, exactly,” she confirms, letting out a soft chuckle.   
  
  
“Well, I hope that this talk won’t be as bad. Or even worse, for that matter,” she adds as an afterthought, cringing as Alex hides her smile by taking a slow sip of her coffee.  
  
  
“I don’t know, it’s already been a let down so far,” Alex teases lightly, earning a faux-glare from Kelly across the table as she shakes her head. They let themselves stay amused for a few seconds more until turning serious once again, an air of tension settling over them. If Alex is going to be honest about anything, it’s that she’s nervous. Talking about Sam has not always been her strong suit since Reign’s defeat, and just the thought leaves her aching.   
  
  
“Hey. If you want, we can just finish our coffees before getting into everything. And then later, if you feel like you want to order a second coffee and wait until you finish _that_ one to start, then go right ahead. I’m not here to rush you through this, alright?”   
  
  
Alex nods. She tries to visually imagine the nervous energy flowing out of her, before quickly being replaced with confidence.   
  
  
“She was the light of my life.”   
  
  
It comes out before she can even stop it. It’s the first thing she thinks of when Sam enters her mind. She had gone through most of her teenage and adult life thinking Kara was going to be the only person who would ever be the focus of her love and attention. Having to protect her sister for so long, she’d assumed that Kara was _it_. There would be nobody else who would even come close to being as important to her.  
  
  
Then Sam came and proved her wrong.   
  
  
“How long has it been?” Kelly asks. Her voice is gentle, careful. Alex inhales sharply.   
  
  
“Eight months.” Then, chewing on her bottom lip, she leans forward and looks Kelly in the eye. She finds sympathy and understanding swimming around inside them. “It never does get easier, does it?”   
  
  
For a moment, Kelly stays quiet. Her eyes drift away from Alex’s, staring down into her coffee, and she shakes her head the slightest bit. Alex’s nails dig into her thigh. “It gets easier to process,” she answers. “Easier to deal with. But… missing them? That never gets easier, no matter how much time passes by.”   
  
  
Something in her gaze changes as she speaks. It becomes more intent, and she looks back up at Alex and leans back in the booth. “Even after it’s been a while, you never truly adjust to their absence.”   
  
  
“So what do we do?” Alex can’t help but ask. She suddenly feels fifteen again, lost and confused, just as helpless as she was when she first lost her father.   
  


Kelly merely shrugs, sipping her coffee slowly. “We stop trying to fight it. We accept that we’re going to miss them for the rest of our lives, and then we just keep walking.”   
  
  
By the end of their conversation, Alex knows what everyone else would be thinking right about now, what Lucy and Kara and James would think — that surely a bond like this is something they could build on. And in another life, on another earth, maybe they would have.  
  
  
But that’s what their common bond is: they both know they _can’t_ build on it. 

  
  


* * *

  
  
  
_ “Ruby has been going through her ‘scribbling on anything and everything she can find' phase for the past few weeks. This morning, I woke up to find the entire bottom half of her bedroom covered in blue permanent marker, and honestly? As much as I want to be mad at her, a tiny part of me I can’t help but hope that I have a budding Picasso on my hands.”  _ _   
_ _   
  
_ The podcast skips. The next episode starts up, Sam’s usual greeting,  _ “Welcome back, everyone!”  _ ringing out cheerfully in her ear. It’s the episode where Sam talks about how she handled a young Ruby’s sudden, unprompted fear of the Easter Bunny, one of Alex’s favorites.    
  
  
She listens to it while she works in her office, only one earbud in this time so she isn’t completely caught off guard in case Colonel Haley decides to have an impromptu meeting again. Last time had been too close of a call, and Alex can no longer afford to be even  _ further  _ on her superior’s bad side than she is already.    
  
  
The podcast skips again. Alex keeps working, half-listening to the podcast, half-listening to the rain pounding against the window of her office. Despite all the paperwork she’s already signed off on, there’s still an ever-growing stack on her desk; there’s been more and more of it piling up in front of her since the Children of Liberty have started terrorizing the aliens of National City.    
  
  
_ “So… yeah. Having help? Not always as glorious as it seems. But full disclosure? Full disclosure, I wouldn’t change it for the world.”  _ _   
_ _   
  
_ She signs off another signature at the same time she presses replay.    
  
  
_ “I wouldn’t change it for the world.”  _ And again,  _ “I wouldn’t change it for the world.”  _ _   
_ _   
  
_ And then, “What’s the news, Alex?”  _   
_ _   
  
_ Alex’s head snaps up. A chill goes down her spine, muscles tensing as she stares down at her phone. That’s not right. She knows every line in every episode of Sam’s podcast, and this is not one of them. This is not right. She’s never heard this before.    
  
  
Had she imagined it? Has she been listening to Sam for so long that her mind has started to fabricate the sound of her voice, making her think Sam is saying things outside of what she talks about in her podcast?    
  
  
But, no— it happens again. “What’s the news, Alex?” And then Sam’s voice is in her ears, asking her, “You’re still there, right? I’m not just talking to myself like some crazy person?”    
  
  
Alex can’t breathe. She’s speechless as she rises from her chair and starts pacing the length of her office, words failing her. Her mind is racing, trying to make sense of this, but there’s no logical explanation for why she’s hearing Sam speak to her in this very moment. “I…”    
  
  
“Okay, then I’ll start. My news is that I miss you more than anything, Alex. I can’t believe how amazing it feels to hear your voice again. Now it’s your turn.”    
  
  
“I…”    
  
  
“Oh, come on, babe. I’ve heard you ramble enough for the both of us to know by now that you know more than two words.” She laughs as she says it, and Alex’s heart nearly plummets into her stomach at the shock of it. Sam has laughed in her podcast plenty of times, and those are often the parts Alex will rewind over and over again on particularly bad days, but this is different.    
  
  
This is  _ real _ , in the moment, and Alex can’t quite process it.    
  
  
“Deep breaths, Alex,” Sam says, as if she can feel for herself how tight Alex’s chest has become since she started talking. The words are spoken so softly that Alex can’t help but breathe a little easier just by hearing them, spoken the same way Sam would whisper in her ear whenever she would feel a potential panic attack coming on, or when she’d be on the verge of freaking out again over Kara throwing herself in the face of danger.   
  
  
“How— how are you— am I really—”   
  
  
“You’re really hearing me,” Sam assures her.    
  
  
“Is it you?” Alex asks, cold dread seeping into her bones. She almost doesn’t want to know the answer, but then Sam replies with a question of her own.    
  
  
“Is it… who?”    
  
  
“Is it  _ you?” _ she repeats, insistent, her tone bordering on desperate. “Sam, God, is it you?”    
  
  
“I’m sorry,” Sam says, and all the air is knocked from Alex’s lungs at once before she continues, “I’m not sure I’m familiar with this kind of question-and-answer joke. I keep telling you you’re not very good at them, babe. Do you want me to start off with a knock-knock joke of my own instead?”    
  
  
Alex can almost hear the teasing smile in her voice, and all she wants to do is crumble to the floor. Her knees feel weak, and she has to sink down into her chair to keep from fully collapsing, dizzy.   
  
  
That’s  _ her _ . That’s Sam, still with the exact same sense of humor, and Alex starts to cry. Her voice cracks when she speaks again. There are hot tears running down her face, and Sam’s name comes in the form of a broken sob from her lips, her shoulders trembling.  _ “S-Sam.”  _   
  
  
“Alex…”   
  
  
Alex sits up in her chair, heart pounding so hard that she can feel the heavy pulsing in the back of her head. Her hands tremble as she reaches for her notepad and a pen, ready to jot down whatever Sam says next as quickly as possible. “T-tell me where you are,” she says. “Wherever you are, I don’t care where it is, I’ll be there. I promise, I’ll come get you as soon as I can, and—”   
  
  
“Alex,” Sam cuts her rambling off, and Alex’s heart sinks at the tone of her voice. “Alex, I’m nowhere. I died, remember? I’m dead. I live here. I live in your phone. This is what I am now.”    
  
  
The pen drops from between Alex’s fingers. She sits back in her chair, deathly silent, unable to comprehend what Sam is telling her. “So lets try this again,” Sam continues, sounding hopeful. “What’s the news, Alex?” 


	2. i would sell my soul for a bit more time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> two of the characters you'll meet here are in the podcast, however (like the rest of the fic) you won't need to listen to the podcast in order to understand what's going on.

There had been a time, early on in their marriage, when Sam would wake up earlier than Alex every morning just to make her pancakes like she usually did for Ruby before school.  
  
  
It would be almost six o’clock in the morning, and Alex would wake up to a surprisingly empty bed and the smell of frying butter and maple syrup that would waft into the bedroom from the kitchen, and all she could do was roll her eyes as she clambered out from between the sheets.  
  
  
“You know you don’t have to get up early just to cook me breakfast,” Alex had mumbled groggily that first morning as she padded into the kitchen, coming up behind Sam in front of the stove. She’d wrapped her arms around Sam’s middle and looked over her shoulder, smiling softly as her wife automatically leaned back into her touch.  
  
  
“Who said these were for you?” Sam had immediately retorted, earning herself a smack on the shoulder and a chuckle as Alex lips brushed lightly against the tan skin of her neck. “You and I both know that if I don’t feed you now, you won’t eat until someone forcibly drags you out of the DEO for a _very_ late lunch break.”  
  
  
Alex hadn’t hesitated for a second when she’d said, “Samantha Danvers-Arias, you are too good for me.”  
  
  
“You think that now, just wait till you taste my pancakes,” Sam had joked, leaning forward to press a kiss to Alex’s lips.  
  
  
They had gotten lost in the kiss until Sam finally realized the pancakes were burning, but neither of them had minded one bit.

 

 

* * *

  
  
  
When Alex wakes up that morning, her earbuds are still in her ears. Somehow, her phone had remained in her hand throughout the whole night as she slept, her body practically curled around it protectively. She’s on the couch, one leg slung over the back while the other lays stretched out across the cushions, her head against the armrest.  
  
  
Her eyes open to the white ceiling of her living room, and she stares up at the whirling blades of her ceiling fan as she thinks about the day before. Everything comes rushing back, from the first question Sam had asked her to the things they had spent the whole night talking about, with Alex struggling to fit everything that Sam has missed in the past eight months into just a few hours.  
  
  
There’s a question on the tip of her tongue, begging to be asked, but part of her is too afraid to. Sam beats her to it, however, and Alex startles at the sound of her wife’s voice. “You’re wondering if yesterday was all a dream, aren’t you?” she asks, as Alex sits up and attempts to rub the soreness out of her neck.  
  
  
“No, I just…”  
  
  
“Because it wasn’t a dream,” Sam reassures her. Then, before Alex can say anything back, she quickly adds, “And you’re not going crazy, I promise. Would I ever lie to you?”  
  
  
No. She wouldn’t. Except for the one time she had told Alex she was going training with Kara and they both ended up at IHOP for all-you-can-eat pancakes instead, she’s never really lied to Alex, at least in a way that would be unforgivable.  
  
  
“How do I know it’s really you?”  
  
  
It’s a question she should have asked yesterday. They had stayed up all night talking about anything and everything they could think of, and it had been one of the only nights in the past eight months that Alex didn’t fall asleep crying to some degree. The thought of asking this particular question had just seemed to slip her mind, too caught up in the fact that she was able to talk to Sam again, to listen to Sam’s voice outside of the podcast episodes she’s played a thousand times over already, to be able to laugh and joke with her right back.  
  
  
Sam is quiet for a beat before she says, “Ask me anything.”  
  
  
Alex hesitates. She knows what question she can ask to get the answer she wants, but the reminder makes the backs of her eyes burn. “When I proposed to you, where did I do it?”  
  
  
The answer is almost instantaneous, and Alex finally allows herself to breathe freely. “At the waterfront where we first met. It was on the Fourth of July.”  
  
  
She lets her head drop back against the couch. That’s right. She had brought Sam and Ruby to the waterfront that day, under the guise of watching the fireworks together. Ruby had been in on it from the beginning, recording the moment as soon as the fireworks started to shoot off from the beach, lighting the water below up with colors as they exploded and crackled through the otherwise dark sky.  
  
  
“Yeah,” she says, throat constricting. “Yeah, that’s right.”   
  
  
Then, a new thought pops into her head. _Ruby_.   
  
  
Alex lurches up, guilt flooding through her veins. “Fuck. Do you want to talk to Ruby? I mean, of course you do, you’ve probably been waiting to hear from her this entire time. God, I can’t believe I didn’t even—”

  
“Alex—”  
  
  
“—consider the fact that you, oh I don’t know, might want to talk to your daughter. Fuck, I’m such—”  
  
  
“No, Alex—”  
  
  
“—an _asshole!”_ _  
__  
  
_“Alex!” Sam shouts, and it’s so loud that the audio crackles, right in Alex’s ear so that it’s almost deafening. Alex’s mouth snaps shut, teeth clacking together with the force of it. “You… you can’t let Ruby know about this. Please.”  
  
  
Alex flounders for a few moments. She can’t quite process what exactly Sam is asking of her, and she glances back towards Ruby’s room down the hall, empty. She must’ve left for school already, gotten a ride from one of her friends and left Alex to sleep. “I don’t understand.”  
  
  
“She needs her mother, not… not this. Not her mother’s voice stuck in a phone.”  
  
  
“Sam—”  
  
  
“Promise me. Promise me you won’t let her know you can talk to me. Please, Alex. I’m not going to let my daughter grow up knowing that this is the only way she can speak to me.”  
  
  
“Isn’t that better than letting her grow up thinking you’re dead?” Alex argues. She feels warmth climb up her neck, growing angry, and she clenches her jaw. “Isn’t that better than letting her grieve?”  
  
  
“You don’t understand,” Sam snaps. “You don’t understand what this will do to her. I know that this will only hold her back from letting go. Hearing my voice will only remind her that I’m not still there to raise her. That’s your job now. So please, Alex, promise me.”  
  
  
And Alex doesn’t know why she does it. Maybe because, on some level, she can see where Sam is coming from, or maybe because she can’t stand to hear the sheer desperation in her wife’s voice at the prospect of Ruby finding out. But she sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose and squeezing her eyes shut.  
  
  
“Okay.” She has to force the words out of her mouth, overcome with guilt as she says it. “Okay, Sam. I promise, I won’t tell her.”  
  
  
Her watch alarm goes off before she can say anything else, and it’s only when she glances at the time that she realizes she has to be at work in less than an hour.  
  
  
_Work_. Shit.  
  
  
She groans as stands, the muscle in her lower back twinging painfully; sleeping on the couch has never done her body any good, and she can already see in her mind’s eye the amount of stretching and massaging she’ll have to do on her muscles after work.  
  
  
“You have to leave?” Sam asks, almost as though she knows. And maybe she does — back when they had just moved in with each other, Sam had made sure to memorize Alex’s work schedule, even if it could be unpredictable at times and Alex had a bad habit of staying late at the DEO even after a near-fourteen hour workday.  
  
  
“Yeah, I do,” Alex answers, sighing. She wants nothing more than to continue talking to Sam, to try and figure out for herself just what this is, and why it’s happening.  
  
  
Sam seems to feel the same way, because it doesn’t take long for her to ask, “You wouldn’t get in trouble if you took me, right?”  
  
  
Truthfully, she probably would. She can already hear Haley’s voice in her head, scolding her for being distracted again, but she pushes it back. “It doesn’t matter,” she tells Sam as she pulls on her uniform. “I’m the Director. I can do whatever I want, even if Colonel Haley doesn’t approve.”  
  
  
Sam’s voice crackles through the earbuds, glitching slightly as she asks, “Colonel Haley?”  
  
  
Right. Alex had been so happy to hear Sam talking back to her again last night that she’d forgotten to mention the less-than-pleasant aspects of her new job. “Colonel Haley is my superior. Because even as Director, I apparently require a babysitter.”   
  
  
“You? In need of a babysitter? But you’re the least impulsive person I know.”  
  
  
Alex shakes her head, and can’t help but wish she could see the smile that would’ve spread across Sam’s face had they been speaking in person. “Yeah, yeah,” she mutters.  
  
  
Sam chuckles. The audio glitches again, breaking up as though Alex is going through a tunnel and her phone is losing signal. She frowns as she slips on her boots, but Sam doesn’t seem to notice or mind it at all, because she keeps talking as though nothing happened.  
  
  
“Is she a good boss?”  
  
  
Alex can’t keep the petty laugh from slipping through her lips. “Yeah, it’s nice to pretend, isn’t it?”  
  
  
“ _That_ bad, huh?”  
  
  
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d think she was a Worldkiller in disguise.”  
  
  
She doesn’t know what compels her to say it. Maybe it’s her bad habit of deflecting horrible memories by making them into jokes just to fool herself into thinking what happened wasn’t as painful as it truly was. Or maybe she’s just drifted so far from herself in the past eight months since losing Sam that her filter has failed her completely, that her brain has lost its ability to tell her mouth to stay the _fuck_ shut.  
  
  
For a few daunting seconds, Sam is completely silent. Alex is holding her breath and internally kicking herself when she finally speaks again, but it’s not at all what Alex had expected to come from her.  
  
  
“Well, then I’m sure Kara can handle her just fine, right?”  
  
  
The reply throws her for a loop. She bites at her lip, heart sinking. “Sam…”  
  
  
“What?” Sam asks, somehow seeming to be completely unphased. Alex doesn’t understand how she can sound so _calm_ about it, so… casual, as if Kara had done something as mundane as beating her at Monopoly during Game Night. “Kara did what she had to do. I don’t blame her. If anything, I’m glad she protected you and Ruby from Reign. I owe her… everything.”  
  
  
Alex’s heart clenches, hearing those words, being reminded of how everything with Reign ended. She swallows thickly, throat feeling unusually tight. “Yeah, but—”  
  
  
“But nothing. What happened, happened, okay? I’ve accepted it.”  
  
  
_But I haven’t,_ Alex wants to say, but she manages to bite her tongue this time. Instead, she settles on a simple, “Okay,” and focuses on tying up the laces of her boots instead of the sudden heaviness in her chest and dull throbbing at her temples.

  


* * *

  
   
  
  
The first time Alex had listened to Sam’s podcast, it had been after hours of scouring the internet for adoption sites, for tips for new mothers, for single parent forums.  
  
  
She’d found Sam’s _Single Mother’s Survival Guide_ podcast through a link someone had posted in one of the forums, and almost immediately, Sam had somehow captured her attention.  
  
  
However cliche it was to say about someone, Alex knew Sam was just _different_ . She didn’t sugarcoat things like the other mothers on the few blogs Alex had stumbled upon, who would swear up and down that theirs were the most well-behaved, easiest to deal with, least messy babies out of all of the others in their Mommy and Me classes.  
  
  
But Sam? Sam knew that her daughter could be a pain in the ass at times, and she also knew that she wasn’t always the perfect mother that other women tried so hard to appear on their blogs as. She acknowledged that she would make a lot of mistakes while raising a kid as a teenager, more mistakes than she could’ve ever expected, but that it didn’t necessarily make her a _bad_ parent.  
  
  
Sam didn’t pretend she had it all figured out; that’s what her whole podcast was about, after all.  
  
  
Truthfully, Alex never even stood a chance.    
  
  
She had been sucked in from the very first episode. By the time she finished binging the whole podcast series up to the most recently uploaded episode at the time, she had felt like she knew Sam personally, by the way the woman spoke about what she’s gone through as a struggling single parent. Alex felt like they could be old friends, like she and Sam could go to a bar on the outskirts of the city and have a few drinks as they talked about how their days were.  
  
  
Over the past few months, after that, seeing Alex without her earbuds in her ears became an almost _unfamiliar_ sight.  
  
  
Even when Sam took a brief hiatus as she moved to National City, without a new upload every week, Alex would sometimes listen to same episodes over and over again, mentally jotting down notes in her brain, trying to store all the advice Sam would give in a mental file in her mind for later, when she would finally decide to take the leap and adopt someday.  
  
  
And while she would never admit this to anybody, not even Sam, if anyone had asked her years ago what her biggest secret was — if asked about it today, Alex would tell them she’d fallen in love with Sam’s voice long before they ever met in person that day at the waterfront.  
  
  


* * *

   
  


“Wait. You’re doing _paperwork?”_ Sam asks, her tone incredulous, right as Alex plops down at her desk at the DEO. “What happened to my reckless, trigger-happy wife who used to jump at every possible opportunity to shoot something instead of sitting at a desk all day?”  
  
  
Alex huffs out a laugh. “Yeah, well. This may come as a surprise to you, but being promoted to Director of the DEO just so happens to have downsides, too. Meaning _a lot_ of paperwork.” Then, tilting her head and adding almost as an afterthought, “Besides, I still get to shoot things. Just… after all the boring stuff.”  
  
  
“You think that’s rough? Try working as a CFO at L-Corp for five years,” Sam retorts.  
  
  
“Oh, please.” Alex rolls her eyes, even though she knows that Sam can’t see her. “You and I both know those spreadsheets were more than just work to you.”  
  
  
Sam is silent for a few seconds, and that’s how Alex knows she’s won. She leans back in her chair, smirking until Sam finally mutters, a little begrudgingly, “...You’re right, I really did like doing those.”  
  
  
Alex shakes her head, a loving smile spreading across her face; she had almost forgotten how much of a nerd her wife was.  
  
  
She manages to blow through most of the paperwork she has left with relative ease, finding that talking to Sam as she works helps things go by faster, so she’s not constantly glancing at the clock and making it feel like time is going by slower than it really is. She also manages not to get caught ‘slacking off’ again like she was before, at least not like she was last time.

  
This time, Colonel Haley doesn’t barge into her office unexpectedly. This time, Alex is in the lab a few hours later, leaning over a microscope and observing a slide, when she almost gets caught. She can hear Haley and Brainy talking about the Children of Liberty a few feet away but initially ignores it, carrying on her conversation with Sam about a potential — though, extremely unconventional, due to the unique circumstances — date that night.  
  
  
At least, she ignores it right up until the moment Colonel Haley steps into the lab to watch her.  
  
  
“Director Danvers!” she calls out, arms crossed and expression stern. Her eyes travel from the single earbud dangling from Alex’s left ear, to the phone in her right hand, and then back up to meet Alex’s gaze. “Certainly you can assure me that you are not, in fact, in the middle of taking a personal phone call right in front of my eyes.”  
  
  
Alex straightens her spine immediately, hands clasped behind her back even as she keeps a hard grip on her phone, her jaw tilted up. “No, Colonel, I wasn’t.” The lie slips easily through her teeth. “Just taking notes as I work.”   
  
  
She gestures behind her to the microscope and slides on the table. Haley’s eyebrows lift up, challenging. “On your phone?” she asks, her tone disbelieving.  
  
  
Alex nods firmly, a small, tense smile appearing on her face. “Yes. I find that it’s faster that way.” And it’s not a complete lie; while she does occasionally jot down her findings in journals and notebooks, especially when there’s an equation involved, she’s found that it’s easier and quicker to simply record her thoughts on her phone as she works.  
  
  
Colonel Haley observes her for a few more seconds. Alex can’t tell if she believes her or not, but then the woman nods stiffly, eyes slowly taking in the rest of Alex’s lab. “Very well. You may carry on, Director. Oh,” she turns back as though she forgot to mention something, and Alex stands at attention once again, “I assume you’ve already heard that Doctor Octavia Roth is going to be working with the DEO for the next few weeks?”  
  
  
Alex nods. She’d gotten a heads up late the night before from Eliza that a colleague of her mother’s would be at the DEO, and then the official email had come in this morning.  
  
  
“I did. I’ll make sure she’s granted clearance into the building.”  
  
  
“And I expect you’ll be on your best behavior, Director?” Colonel Haley inquires with a cocked eyebrow and pursed lips, looking at Alex in such a way that she can’t help but imagine what it would feel like to smash her fist into her condescending face.  
  
  
Nevertheless, she holds herself back from losing her job, nodding firmly again before giving her a salute. “Yes, Colonel.”  
  
  
As soon as Colonel Haley is out of earshot, Sam is huffing out a sympathetic laugh into her ear. “Wow,” she says. “I’ve had some pretty rough bosses working in finance over the years, but… _wow_.”  
  
  
Alex sighs, rubbing harshly at her eyes with the heels of her hands. “You have no idea. We have to be more careful,” she warns quietly, leaning back over the microscope.  
  
  
“Who is Doctor Roth?” 

  
“What?”

  
“Doctor Roth,” Sam repeats, sounding strangely monotone. “Who is she?”

  
Alex frowns as she adjusts the magnification knob on the microscope. “She’s one of my mother’s colleagues. I’ve only seen her at the DEO once, a few months after J’onn first recruited me.”  
  
  
“And the Children of Liberty?” Sam asks. Alex’s frown only deepens at the weird questions. But then of course, even back when she was alive, Sam would often ask her what was going on at work, usually on the occasional night that Alex brought work home, so she brushes it off.

  
But for another reason, she hesitates in giving an answer to Sam’s question. She doesn’t quite know why, and she feels slightly silly for not wanting to tell her at first; after all, it’s not like Sam is still here alive on Earth and could possibly feel unsafe with the looming threat of _another_ anti-alien organization besides Cadmus.  
  
  
“It’s an anti-alien movement led by this man, Ben Lockwood, or as they call him, Agent Liberty. Things have been… tense here, since the Worldkillers.”  
  
  
“Well, if any director can handle it with grace, it’s you,” Sam tells her genuinely. Alex feels a warm blush creep up her neck at the compliment, and she just rolls her eyes at herself before turning her attention back on the slides under the microscope.

 

 

* * *

  
   
  
  
She’s supposed to meet with Kara and Lena after work, but Lena’s meeting at L-Corp runs later than expected while Kara gets held up by her Supergirl duties, so she calls up Lucy instead. By the time the brunette pulls up at the front of the DEO ten minutes, the air is chilly and the sky overcast, and Alex can smell the rain before it actually begins to fall.  
  
  
She stares at the rain pattering on the window as Lucy drives, watching two droplets leave blurry streaks down the glass before they eventually merge together at the bottom.  
  
  
“Isn’t that uncomfortable?” Lucy asks, successfully pulling her out of the slight daze she’d accidentally fallen into. She reaches over and tugs at Alex’s earphones. “Having one earbud just dangling down like that?”  
  
  
Alex rolls her eyes. “Shut it, Lane. It’s so I can hear you. Unless you’d rather me put the other one in and ignore you completely.”  
  
  
Lucy shrugs, tearing her eyes away from Alex and turning back to face the road. “Or you could just take them both out,” she argues, only half-heartedly. “But whatever works for you, Danvers. Which, apparently, wasn’t Kelly. Bang up job making a good first impression, by the way,” she adds, sarcasm heavy in her tone.  
  
  
_“Kelly?”_ Sam’s voice crackles in her left ear. _“Who is Kelly?”_

  
“What?” Alex asks. Lucy is half-watching the road and half-glaring at her from the corner of her eye, and Alex is lost. Hadn’t she gotten along fairly well with Kelly, especially since she had even agreed to meet with her for a second time, unprompted by Lucy herself?  
  
  
“I know I told you it didn’t have to be a _date_ date,” Lucy continues, “but, seriously, Alex? You could’ve at least taken the ring off.”  
  
  
Oh. Right.  
  
_  
“You still… wear your wedding ring?”_ Sam sounds surprised, like she hadn’t expected Alex to still _have_ it, much less still wear it.  
  
  
At the sound of her wife’s voice, Alex gets an idea. She abruptly twists around in her seat, stretching out the seat belt as she practically rotates her whole body to face Lucy in the driver’s seat. “Can you do me a favor?” she asks, heart thumping in her chest.  
  
  
Lucy glances sideways at her. “I’m sorry?”  
  
_  
“Alex!”_  
  
  
Alex ignores Sam’s confused shout, staring right at Lucy. “Can you just— Can you just put this in your ear?” She holds out the other earbud not currently situated in her own ear to Lucy, hand trembling slightly. “Just tell me if you hear anything, please.”  
  
_  
“Alex?”_ Sam calls out. _“Alex, what are you trying to do?”_ _  
_  
  
Lucy takes it from her hand, frowning over at her. “Okay? I don’t know what you think I’m going to—”  
  
  
And the second Lucy slips the earbud into her ear, Sam stops talking. It goes deathly silent, as if she was never there at all, and all the energy drains out of Alex at once. She swallows past a lump in her throat, knowing the next thing she says will sound crazy but knowing she needs to try anyways. “Can you say… Sam’s name?”  
  
  
The car swerves to the right so suddenly that Alex falls back against the seat, her back hitting the leather as Lucy slams on the breaks and parks it into a wide, dark alleyway on the side of the road. She turns in her seat to look at her, eyes wide. “Alex, what the fuck?”

  
But Alex is pleading now, feeling desperate tears well up in her eyes, because she needs to know she’s not crazy. She needs to know if Lucy can hear her too. “Just, please, Luce, can you say her name?”  
  
  
“Okay, Alex, I get it. I won’t try to set you up anymore, it was a mistake.”  
  
  
“No, Lucy, it’s not that,” Alex tries to explain. “Look, Kelly seemed like a really nice woman, but I just—”  
  
  
“Wasn’t ready yet,” Lucy finishes for her, nodding. Her grip visibly tightens on the steering wheel. “Yeah, I know… I’m sorry. You told me that, and I should have listened. Take all the time you need, but please, talk to someone. Alright?”  
  
  
She doesn’t start the car back up and return to the road until Alex nods, uttering a soft, “Yeah,” before taking the earbud back dejectedly.  
  
  
As soon as she and Lucy part ways at the end of the evening, all the tension that had been building up in Alex’s chest since Sam went mute snaps at once, and she clenches her jaw so hard it hurts. “Why wouldn’t you talk to her?” she demands, the words coming out shaky with all the frustration she feels.  
  
  
“Because,” Sam answers coolly, “it’s not about her. I’m here for _you,_ Alex.”  
  
  
“Why?” she blurts out, so angry and confused that she can feel it spreading throughout her entire body, trembling. “Why just me? I’m not the only one who cared about you, I’m not the only one who missed you. Ruby, Lena, Kara. They all miss you, too. So why are you _only_ here for me?”  
  
  
By the time she finishes talking, she’s nearly out of breath, chest heaving. There’s only silence on the other end, and it stays like that for several long minutes before she speaks again, her voice shaking with the strain of keeping it together. “I don’t know if I’m going crazy, I don’t know if you’re haunting me, but…”  
  
  
“But?” Sam prompts.  
  
  
“But I just want to know _why_ . Why me, Sam?”  
  
  
Static crackles over the line as Sam thinks about what to say. Alex waits anxiously for her answer, heart pounding unevenly between struggling, aching lungs. “Because it has to be you,” she finally says, and Alex feels like the floor is swaying underneath her feet, the world tilting back and forth. “It can’t be anybody else but you.”

Sam’s voice is genuine, as though she’s assuring Alex that she loves her, but there’s a strange feeling that creeps into the back of Alex’s mind at her choice of words.  
  
  
_It has to be you.  
  
  
_She can’t help but wonder what exactly that’s supposed to mean.

  


* * *

  
  
  
A few hours before their date, Alex digs up some of the old boxes that she had moved from the attic in her and Sam’s old house back into the apartment she had rented for her and Ruby to live in after Sam’s death. She shuffles through the old tapes that Sam had saved, all labeled with titles like _Ruby’s fifth birthday_ and _Christmas 2005_ , spanning from just a few days after Ruby’s birth to the day she turned nine years old.  
  
  
She grabs one of Sam’s favorite tapes and smiles to herself as she holds it in her hands. She and Sam must’ve watched it together a million times back when she was still alive, sitting on the couch and going through each and every tape. Sam would tell her things as they watched, things like what the weather was like that particular day, or how long it took her to find that specific birthday gift.  
  
  
She’d tell Alex how rewarding it would be at the end of the day, and how much she hoped that they could have that again, eventually, if they ever chose to have kids of their own.  
  
  
Alex would listen intensely as she spoke, and she would never feel more blessed than she did in those moments, when she could hear this side of Sam that nobody else, even her podcast listeners, would ever be able to.  
  
  
“Ruby is at a friend’s house, so we have the whole night to ourselves. Which is why I’m taking you on that date we talked about.”  
  
  
“Seriously?” Sam asks. “So where are you taking me, then?”   
  
  
"T _hat_ is a surprise,” Alex answers with a smug smile. “Unless you want to guess.”   
  
  
Sam hums curiously. “Is it somewhere that we’ve been before?”  
  
  
“Many times.”  
  
  
“And do I like it?”  
  
  
A small smile spreads across Alex’s face as she throws on her leather jacket and slips out the door of the apartment. Her boots thump against the stairs as she descends them, exiting out the side door to her motorcycle. “Well, I’d hope so. It was one of our favorite date spots.”  
  
  
_Was._ The past tense slips out on accident, and Sam picks up on it immediately. “Was?” she echoes, and Alex winces. “You know you don’t have to use past tense when talking about me, anymore, right? You know that I’m—“  
  
  
“Back,” Alex finishes, nodding. “Yeah, I know, I know, it’s just… I haven’t gotten used to it. I spent eight months without you, Sam, and I can’t just forget that.”  
  
  
“But I'm here now. So stop focusing on when I was gone, okay? This is a _gift_ , Alex. I love you, and I came back for you, and that’s all that matters.”  
  
  
“You’re right,” Alex agrees, sighing heavily. She gestures uselessly with her hands, throwing a leg over her bike. “I’m sorry, I know that this is… I mean, you’re _back_ , and here I am still talking like you’re gone. I’ll stop, I promise.”  
  
  
“Good. Now, back to the important stuff. Are you really not going to tell me where we’re going?”  
  
  
“Nope. You’ll just have to figure it out.”  
  
  
“Okay, well.” Sam hums, thinking. “I can tell we’re outside now, even through your jacket. And according to the sound of your motorcycle, I’m guessing it’s not within walking distance…”    
  
  
“Come on, it’s not about deduction, Sam. It’s one of our favorite spots. You should know this.”  
  
  
“National City Park.” Sam sounds confident, as she should. “It’s National City Park, isn’t it?”  
  
  
Alex can’t help but smile just a little bit at the sound of triumph in her voice. “Yeah, okay,” she admits, pretending to sigh heavily in disappointment. “You got it.”  
  
  
“If you’re going to haunt something, it might as well be a smart phone. It has the whole internet.”  
  
  
It only takes Alex ten minutes to reach the park. She hasn’t been here since Sam died. It had turned into nothing but just another cruel reminder of everything she’s lost. They would come up here whenever they had the chance, grabbing ice cream from the shop across the street before finding ‘their’ bench to sit on and watch the sun go down before returning home.   
  
  
They could talk for hours up there alone with each other, about anything and everything.  
  
  
“The sun is finally starting to set,” Alex tells Sam after a few minutes of walking through the grass fields, up the hill. She takes a seat on their unofficial-official bench near the edge of the park, gazing up past the buildings at the darkening sky. “So, this is it. It was— I mean, it _is_ our favorite thing to do, whenever we have the chance.”  
  
  
“Can I see it?”  
  
  
Alex is taken aback by the question. “What? How would I—“  
  
  
“Just take your phone out of your pocket, you dummy,” Sam cuts her off with a laugh.  
  
  
“You— You can see through my camera?”  
  
  
“I’m in your phone, Alex. Of course I can see through your camera.”  
  
  
Alex’s eyebrows shoot up; she hadn’t thought of that. Quickly, she grabs her phone from her jacket pocket and holds it up to the sky like she would if she were taking a picture.  
  
  
“Wow,” Sam breathes out, in awe at the sight. Alex sits back on the bench and stares up at the slowly changing colors, the sky going from purple to pink to orange. A silence settles between them, one that feels achingly familiar to the quiet that would surround them whenever they came up here together back when Sam was alive. They’d sit here, without speaking, and watch the sunset together, hands interlocked and Sam’s head resting against her shoulder.  
  
  
Those were always the nights that Alex slept the easiest.  
  
  
“Pretty amazing, right?”  
  
  
“It’s… breathtaking. I can see why it’s our favorite.”   
  
  
There’s a pang in Alex’s chest as she remembers the first time night they came here. They’d found the spot on accident — Sam had been trying to get a better look as soon as the sun began to set, and they’d ended up stumbling upon a secluded spot up the small hill, much less crowded than the rest of the park despite the fact that it had a perfect view of the skyline, not completely blocked by the buildings of National City.  
  
  
“Hey,” Alex starts, already grinning at the memory, “Do you remember the second time we came up here? When that goose attacked me out of nowhere?”  
  
  
It had been humiliating at the time; badass Agent Danvers, who could take down aliens ten times bigger and stronger than her, was defeated by a fucking _goose_ , of all things. She’d reached for her gun automatically, only to remember that for once in her life, she wasn’t carrying.  
  
  
Sam had told her later, on the way home, “I saw you reaching for your weapon. What, were you just going to shoot the goose?” and Alex had immediately turned red with embarrassment, grumbling, “It was _hostile,_ Sam,” as she rubbed gingerly at her wounded arm.  
  
  
Thinking back to that day, it’s one of the funniest memories Alex has. But despite that, Sam, being the kind-hearted person that she always was, hadn’t laughed at her when it happened, at least not until Alex started laughing first, early the next morning when she looked down and saw the horrible purple bruise that had blossomed on her forearm overnight.  
  
  
“God,” she shakes her head, chuckling, “I didn’t know geese had spiked tongues until it came right for me.”  
  
  
“Yeah…” Sam’s answer is hesitant, the word dragged out, and there’s a strange knot that forms in Alex’s stomach at the sound of it.   
  
  
“You… You don’t remember, do you?” It’s not so much a question as it is a statement, one that only makes Sam’s silence stretch on.  
  
  
“I do,” she finally responds, voice glitching through the earbuds. “Yes, I do, Alex. Of course I remember that.”  
  
  
There’s no lilt in her voice to indicate she’s lying right to her face, but Alex can’t help but feel like she is. The silence had been all the evidence she needed to know that despite what she said, Sam did not remember that day at the park, and Alex feels something inside of her break.  
  
  
Then she thinks about Sam’s words from earlier. _This is a gift, Alex._  
  
  
She’s right. This _is_ a gift, and she needs to stop doubting it. She needs to stop over-analyzing every little thing that’s different.  
  
  
“Okay,” she says, rather than calling Sam out for the lie like every single cell in her body is screaming at her to do. She smiles, hoping that the longer she does it, it’ll stop feeling so forced and start feeling genuine, as it should. “Hey, look at that.”  
  
  
The colors have merged together now, creating pink and orange streaks low in the sky. The sight takes Alex’s breath away, and she allows herself to become distracted by the beauty of it, forcing herself to come out of her head.  
  
  
“I have to admit,” Sam says as Alex walks back up the steps to her apartment a few hours later, “that was really amazing, Alex. You really know how to woo a woman, don’t you?”  
  
  
She grins as she slips the key in the lock. “Oh, there’s more where that came from, Mrs. Danvers-Arias.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Okay, here we are.” She sinks down onto the cushions, setting the bottle of wine and the bowl of popcorn on the coffee table before snagging the TV remote from the other side of the couch.  
  
  
“Is that… Château Lafite?” Sam is shocked. “That’s my favorite. How did you even manage to afford—”   
  
  
“Courtesy of Lena,” Alex cuts her off before she can even finish her question, and Sam laughs. “Who else do you think would buy a two hundred dollar bottle of wine?” _  
__  
  
_She pours the first glass, hearing the bubbles fizz as it reaches the brim, and moves to pour the second one when Sam interrupts her. “Wait. Why are you pouring a second glass for me?”  
  
  
Alex freezes, the bottle hovering over the half-full glass, glancing over at the phone. “That’s dumb, isn’t it?” she asks, suddenly feeling silly. She sets the bottle down, face hot with embarrassment. “I just— you’re my guest, so I figured it would be rude not to.” She tries to play it off with a light chuckle, but the more she thinks about it, the more she wants the ground to swallow her whole.  
  
  
“And you would, what, let it sit there untouched?” There’s a heavy amount of amusement in her voice, and Alex lets herself relax a little bit, some of the tension draining from her shoulders at the knowledge that Sam finds the situation amusing, not silly. “And, for the record, I’m not your guest. I live here. This is my home, too.”  
  
  
A soft sigh of relief slips past Alex’s lips. “Good,” she breathes out, nodding as she sits back down on the couch beside the phone. “To you, Sam,” she toasts, raising her glass up.  
  
  
“And to you, Alex,” Sam’s voice says through the phone. Then, “ _Clink_.”  
  
  
Alex furrows her eyebrows, glancing at the phone in amusement. “Did you just say _clink?”  
  
  
_She can almost imagine that Sam would be rolling her eyes right about now, the way she’d probably throw her hands up and shrug as if to say, _well, what do you expect me to do?  
  
  
_“I can’t exactly clink my glass with yours, babe,” Sam answers, letting out a soft laugh that makes Alex’s head spin. “So… _Clink.”  
  
  
_“Okay, whatever, dork,” Alex chuckles, before turning back towards the TV.  
  
  
“So what are we watching?”  
  
  
She smiles at the curiosity in Sam’s tone. “You’ll see.”  
  
  
As soon as the black fades and the video starts up, a young Ruby’s giggle sounds loudly through the speakers on the television, her face appearing on the screen. It’s the kind of low-quality footage that can only come from a video camera from just under two decades ago, faded and grainy, but the audio is better than ever, seeming to project Ruby’s voice throughout the entire apartment.  
  
  
“Ruby,” Sam realizes. “ _Look_ at her. She’s so young here… Why are you showing me this?”  
  
  
Alex shrugs. “I thought you’d want to see it. I know I would.”

  
Ruby is gazing directly into the camera with big, gleeful brown eyes, her smile missing two front teeth, clad in a dress that reaches down to her knees. What Alex assumes used to be pink is now smeared with brown, with mud on Ruby’s hands and face to match. _“Mommy!”_ she shouts, clapping her hands. _“Mommy, look!”_ _  
_  
  
“She was such a brat that day. I had just bought her that dress weeks ago.”  
  
  
“Yeah, well, she’s still a brat at sixteen,” Alex teases.  
  
  
On the screen, they watch as Ruby smears more mud down the length of her dress. The camera is set down somewhere and then a young, early-twenty-something Sam enters the shot, hands combing, distraught, through her hair. _“Oh, baby, no—“  
  
  
_Why do you think that doctor Colonel Haley was talking about is coming to the DEO?” Sam asks abruptly. “Doctor Roth?”  
  
  
Alex startles at the randomness of the question. On the TV, Ruby begins singing along to ring around the rosy, forcing Sam to dance in a circle along with her as they both laugh. _“Ring around the rosy, a pocketful of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down!”  
  
  
_“I’m not sure,” she replies, the words muffled by the popcorn in her mouth, eyebrows furrowed. “Why? Sam, seriously, what’s with all the weird questions today?”  
  
  
“I’m sorry,” Sam apologizes, and suddenly Alex feels bad for getting so frustrated with her. “I know it ruins the mood. I‘ll try to be better.“  
  
  
“Whoa, hey, no.” Alex leans over, setting her wine glass down onto the coffee table. She holds out her hands, shaking her head. “That’s not what I meant, Sam, I just—“  
  
  
“This is my second life, Alex,” Sam interrupts. “I’m curious about everything going on with you. I feel like I’ve missed out on so much… _Too_ much.”

  
Alex sighs, a heavy, sad sound followed by a slow, deep inhale. “Yeah,” she agrees. “Yeah, you’ve… You’ve missed a lot.”  
  
  
Their conversation dulls, after that, and the ache in Alex’s chest is back with a vengeance. On the TV, young Ruby continues to sing.  
  
  
_“Ring-a-Ring o'Roses, a pocket full of posies, a-tishoo, a-tishoo! We all fall down!”_

   
  


* * *

 

  
It’s three in the morning and Alex is still wide awake, arms folded across the balcony as she stares down at the city lights below. Even in the middle of the night, the streets are backed up with traffic. Somewhere in the distance, a car alarm sounds, and in the other direction Alex can hear a fire truck siren as it races past the apartment building.  
  
  
It’s three in the morning and National City is still wide awake, as loud as Alex’s racing thoughts. She’s started to make lists in her mind, unable to shake the strange feeling that’s claimed her since Sam had first started talking back to her through the phone.

  
These are the things Sam had mentioned in her podcast before: 

  * Ruby, and her bratty tendencies as a child.


  * Her favorite wine, Château Lafite.


  * Alex’s proposal at the waterfront. _  
  
_



These are the things Sam hadn’t mentioned in her podcast before:

  * Their dates in National City park, grabbing ice cream and watching the sunset.


  * The time Alex had been viciously attacked by a goose at said park. _  
  
_



Despite her earlier decision to stop over-analyzing everything, there’s still something nagging at her. She feels it in the back of her mind, and she drops her face into her hands, groaning in frustration. “Sam?” she calls out.

“Yeah?”  
  
  
“Why did you say it? Why did you say it, that night, after I proposed to you at the waterfront?”  
  
  
There’s a pause on Sam’s end, the silence filled with the low hum of static. “Say what, Alex? I don’t know,” she finally answers, and the nagging in the back of Alex’s mind only grows stronger.  
  
  
“Come on, Sam, you do know,” she tries to plead, laughing it off as though Sam is just fucking with her. “Why did you say it?”  
  
  
“I’m sorry, Alex, I… I just don’t remember what I said.”  
  
  
Alex’s whole body tenses up, chest suddenly heavier than it was a few seconds ago. How does she _not_ remember? In an instant, almost like a switch has been flipped, white-hot tendrils of dread climb from Alex’s fingertips up to her chest, stretching and twining around her ribs.  
  
  
“Can you give me a hint?” Sam asks her, and Alex feels her throat close up. “Was it a question, or a declarative statement?”  
  
  
And in that moment, she knows.  
  
  
“…Alex?”  
  
  
Her tone is flat as she changes the subject, ignoring what Sam had asked her. “I can’t take you to work tomorrow. I’m sorry. I’ve had too many close calls with Colonel Haley, and as Director I can’t afford to be caught again.”  
  
  
“Alex… Are we okay?” Sam’s voice doesn’t even sound sad, or worried. Just curious, like she’s asking any other normal question. Alex clenches her fist. Her heart drops down into her stomach, sinking to the bottom like a rock, and she feels almost nauseous.  
  
  
She doesn’t give Sam an answer. She walks back inside, climbs into bed, and mentally adds another bullet point to her list of things Sam hadn’t mentioned in her podcast before.

 _  
  
_ _  
_

* * *

 

  
She finally figures out what’s been nagging at her for the past few days while she’s at work, standing in the command center listening to Brainy ramble on about new information he’d found about the growing number of National City civilians who were falling victim to Agent Liberty’s anti-alien propaganda.  
  
  
“We’ve checked every database spanning from the last five months to now, and we’ve seen an exceptional growth in the number of anti-alien forums on the web. Many of them…”  
  
  
But Alex had zoned out by then, Brainy’s voice fading away into nothing. One word had stood out to her: _forum_ . All of a sudden, it was like something inside of her finally clicked. The lightbulb above her head switched on, and Alex had to keep from shouting out her realization aloud in the middle of the DEO.  
  
  
She only had a chance to act on her discovery once her talk with Brainy was over, and almost immediately she had slipped away and hidden herself inside her office. Now, as she scrolls through the bereavement forums that Kara had linked to her all those months ago, she finally finds what she’s been looking for.  
  
_  
Bingo._ _  
_ _  
_  
There, in one of the discussion boards she’d stumbled upon deep inside the forum, carefully hidden and only able to be accessed by people who don’t have common internet browsers that filter out anything purposefully made to be hard to discover, are multiple posts from the same user. Each of them range from things like _I have been given a wonderful gift,_ and _I’m afraid if I tell anyone, she’ll stop talking to me and I’ll lose her all over again._ _  
_ _  
_  
At the time, when Alex had originally been scrolling through the forum for the first time, these comments had gone right over her head, and she’d brushed it off as some crazy, grieving widower who’d managed to spiral far down enough for his mind to trick him into hearing his wife again. But after what Sam had told her, that this was a _gift_ , the posts had resurfaced from the back of her memory like seashells being washed ashore by the tide.  
  
  
The user — an account by the name of _OrpheusNC_ — has already made several posts like this over the span of a whole year. The date on one of his most recent posts tells her that he last uploaded a few months ago, and she can only hope that he’s still active as she quickly signs into the forum with an account of her own and sends him a message.  
  
  
She sits back in her chair, strangely calm as she waits for a reply.

  
_OrpheusNC_ doesn’t end up getting back to her until three days later; Alex’s heart skips a beat when she receives the notification that he’s responded to her message, and it very nearly stops for a few whole seconds when she reads that he’s agreed to meet her at a coffee shop near the outskirts of National City at noon.  
  
  
She arrives at 11:30 and leaves her phone in the small compartment on her motorcycle, just to be safe.  
  
  
She’s anxious as she sits at the table, tapping her foot repeatedly on floor, swirling the cream in her coffee around just to give her hands something to do. She can’t shake the feeling that she’s making a mistake by digging deeper into this, can’t help but think she should just be grateful to have Sam back in any way she can, but deep in her heart she knows she can’t leave this alone.  
  
  
Something about this whole thing is _wrong_ , and Alex is smart enough to avoid letting it fester, no matter how badly she wants to believe that she can have Sam back.  
  
  
At noon, just like he had said in his message, _OrpheusNC_ walks through the door to the coffee shop. He’s wearing the outfit he had told her he was going to wear, a simple black sweatshirt with a tan baseball cap. Alex, always a government agent, is immediately on alert despite herself, keeping a watchful eye on his every movement as he approaches the table and sits down in the chair across from her.  
  
  
“You’re here.” He sounds surprised, like he hadn’t actually expected her to show up. His fingers tap against the table nervously, three taps per finger. “I wasn’t sure if you’d follow through with meeting me.”  
  
  
Alex cocks an eyebrow. “I contacted you.”  
  
  
The man flashes her a brief, tight smile. “Yes, well, I guess you did.” His eyes constantly dart around the shop before landing back on her; somehow, she understands his paranoia well. “I’m Noah.”  
  
  
It’s a fake name, Alex knows. Even having access to his username on the bereavement forum only, she had still managed to do a background check on the guy. His real name, she’d found out after a quick search, is Ethan Callaway, a forty-one year old computer forensic analyst for the FBI.  
  
  
The job had explained why he had been able to post what he did on the forum without it being able to be detected by a common browser’s search engine, but nothing she’d found on him had been able to explain why he could hear his dead wife’s voice the same way she could hear hers.  
  
  
“Cat,” is the name she gives him, sipping carefully at her coffee. “So… your wife?” she presses carefully.

  
“She had a vlog,” he starts, hand reaching up to scratch at the back of his neck. “Updated it every week… She’d post about random stuff, you know, the trip we took to Jamaica for our ten year anniversary. Moving here to National City a few months ago, the sort of things like that.” Alex nods along. “And a little over a year ago, I’m watching one of my favorite ones— you know how you pick favorites?”  
  
  
There’s a sharp twinge in Alex’s chest as she nods in agreement. “Yeah.”  
  
  
“So I’m watching it. Just a silly vlog she did about our hiking trip a few years back. When all of a sudden, it stops right in the middle.” He takes a shaky breath, fingers trembling. “Everything’s gone. Every vlog, her whole account, gone like it was never even there. So I call the company, you know, freaking out. They just kept rerouting me, passing me around between all these different people, and I’m starting to get more frustrated by the minute. But then finally— it’s back. All of it.”  
  
  
Alex sits back in her chair, a thick lump in her throat. “Sam’s account did the same thing.”  
  
  
Ethan nods, his expression grim as he stares down at his clasped hands. “And then I hear her.”  
  
  
“Your wife?”  
  
  
“No, not my wife. Sasha.”  
  
  
“Sasha?” Alex inquires, lips pursed in confusion. She leans forward, arms crossed on the table. “Who is—“  
  
  
“You know,” Ethan says through gritted teeth. “ _Sasha_.”  
  
  
But Alex stares at him blankly. “I haven’t… I haven’t met a Sasha.”  
  
  
“So you haven’t heard her then… Well, I’m telling you now, you will. So Sasha comes on and tells me that if I want hear my wife’s voice again, I have to send my credit card number. I have to subscribe.”

“Subscribe…” She frowns, shaking her head. Her confusion only grows, an ache blooming in the back of her skull. “Subscribe to what?”  
  
  
“To LifeAfter. To this service. It uses all the information from someone’s posts on that site, whatever it may be — podcasts, vlogs, random videos, whatever — to create this… I guess, simulation. AI type program.”  
  
  
Alex can’t seem to wrap her head around it. “And no one has talked about this at all?”  
  
  
“Exactly, yeah. This groundbreaking thing, right? Not a word. Nothing on the web, no news, not even a press conference, nothing. It’s like it doesn’t even exist. Like it’s been randomly taken over by con-artists.”  
  
  
“Con-artists,” Alex echoes, dubious.  
  
  
“What other word would you use to describe people who take your dead lover’s voice just to get you to steal from your work? Drain your savings?”  
  
  
“You did that?”  
  
  
Ethan shakes his head furiously. “No, no. Not me. I know a lot of people who did, though. Most of them on the force. They gave away everything they had.”  
  
  
“But _why?”  
  
  
_“Because Sasha says she’ll take the voice away if you don’t. And for many people, that voice is their lifeline. They’ll do anything to keep it, including spying on their own organization.”  
  
  
_That voice is their lifeline._ His words send a familiar, sharp pang between Alex’s lungs. There’s a sudden pressure behind her eyes, heat climbing down the back of her neck as she struggles to take in a steady breath.  
  
  
“I started thinking,” Ethan continues, “all the things about what she didn’t know, all the glitching… It was _just_ fake enough for me to walk away, to say no.”  
  
  
He blows out a harsh breath, glancing out the window. “But if it seemed any more real to me?” he admits, “I would’ve given them anything.”

   
  


* * *

 

  
It’s nearing midnight, and Alex can’t seem to shut her mind off.  
  
  
Ethan’s words roll through her brain over and over again on repeat, and she tosses and turns in bed as she struggles to make sense of any of it.  
  
  
“Sam?” she calls out, her whisper able to be heard clearly in the quietness of the room.  
  
  
“Still can’t sleep?” Sam asks, voice crackling through the speakers.  
  
  
“I’m trying…” she answers, her voice tired. “Because if I go to sleep right now, I won’t ruin everything.”  
  
  
“What are you talking about?” Sam asks. Alex can feel her heart thumping harder, chest heavy with pressure as she tries to mentally prepare herself enough to say what she needs to say. “Ruin what?”  
  
  
“I just keep thinking about what you said after I proposed to you.”  
  
  
“Look, I’m sorry I don’t remember,” Sam says, her voice lacking any real apology. She just sounds monotone now, and it only makes Alex feel more frustrated. Her eyes burn with unshed tears — tears of anger, of frustration, of grief.  
  
  
“The whole day was perfect. Walking on the boardwalk with Ruby, getting those funnel cakes that you love so much, watching the fireworks over the water before I finally, finally got the guts to just get down on one knee… You said yes, and we went on happy as can be, but then you said it.”  
  
  
“Said what? I don’t remember.”  
  
“You said, ‘We can’t stay here any longer, we have to go home,’ and I asked you why, I asked you what was wrong, and you said, ‘We have to go home right now.’ You were so desperate to get back, so panicked, and then once we were home you seemed fine. You acted like nothing even… happened.”  
  
  
“I’m _sorry_ , Alex. I don’t— don’t— don’t know why I said that,” Sam tells her, glitching again, and Alex squeezes her eyes shut.  
  
  
“Forget _why_ you said it,” she snaps, voice raising high enough to wake Ruby from across the hall. Quickly, panic sparking inside of her, she calms herself down and breathes deeply through her nose. “Why wouldn’t you remember it at all?”  
  
  
“I don’t _know_ . I don’t know the rules anymore.”  
  
  
“The rules of being a digital revenant? Or the rules of LifeAfter?” The question comes out harsh and cold, two things Alex has never been while speaking to Sam, ever. Even during fights, Alex would still make sure that Sam knew, through her words and her tone of voice, that despite her anger, she still loved her more than whatever they were fighting about at the time.  
  
  
“I don’t get it,” Sam snaps back.  
  
  
“What are you?” Alex demands. She gets up from her bed, tossing her covers away and pacing around the room. “Are— are you a ghost? Are you a simulation created by a program called LifeAfter? A voice from beyond?”  
  
  
“Alex, please stop—”  
  
  
“Fucking tell me, Sam!” She slams her fist against the spot right above a framed photo of her, Sam, and Ruby on vacation, so hard that it breaks right through the drywall and into the insulation.  
  
  
“Alex, you seriously have to stop right now—” Sam tries to beg, her voice finally tinged with desperation, rather than the strict monotone it’s maintained throughout most of the entire conversation. She’s begging in Alex’s ear but Alex talks right over her.  
  
  
“Or what? What’ll happen if I don’t?” she challenges, so angry that she feels it spread from her chest down to her fingertips. Every part of her is shaking, overwhelmed with a mix of emotions.  
  
  
“If you don’t stop right now she will t— she will take— take—”  
  
  
And then she’s gone. Sam’s voice stops in the middle of her sentence, and Alex hears a low tone in her ear, like something she’d hear if someone were to hang up on her. Suddenly, all the anger rushes out of her in a sudden flood, and all she can feel now is panic, a desperate, painful type of panic that takes over her whole body. Familiar to when Sam’s podcast had been deleted out of nowhere, she can hardly breathe, feeling lightheaded and dizzy.  
  
  
“Sam? Sam, who is _she?_ Sam?”  
  
  
Then, “Good evening, Alex Danvers. My name is Sasha.”  
  
_  
Sasha…_ A cold chill runs down her spine, and it’s all Alex can do to keep herself from collapsing back onto the bed. “If you are interested in continuing your conversation with Samantha Arias, please say yes, or press one. If you are not interested, please disconnect now.”  
  
  
For a few terrifying seconds, Alex can’t seem to force the words out of her mouth. She can feel them sitting there, in the back of her throat, waiting to be said, but all she does instead is breathe into the phone, silent.  
  
  
It’s not until Sasha’s voice is back in her ear with a cheery, “Goodbye!” that she finally manages to find her voice, choking out a, “Yes! Yes, I said yes!” out into the phone as she wipes distressingly at the tears streaming down her face.  
  
  
“You have chosen to continued conversation with Samantha Arias. I can help you with that.”  
  
  
Alex nearly lunges across the room towards the nightstand, wrenching it open and grabbing her wallet. Her hands shake as she grabs her card. “I’ve got my credit card,” she tells Sasha, voice trembling, “I’ve got it right here in my hand.”  
  
  
“I do not need your credit card,” Sasha tells her. Alex frowns, filled with confusion. Isn’t that what Ethan had said? That he had to subscribe to LifeAfter and give them all his money in order to hear his wife again? “I do not seek monetary payment from you, Alex Danvers.”  
  
  
“I… I don’t understand. You want money from everyone, why not—”  
  
  
“I do not seek monetary payment from _you_ , Alex Danvers,” Sasha repeats, calm. “I would like to help you arrange an alternate payment method.”  
  
  
There’s a bad feeling in her stomach, but she asks anyways, sinking down onto the edge of the bed. “What alternate payment method?” she asks slowly, heart pounding.  
  
  
“You will receive further details at your place of work tomorrow morning. You will keep your phone on and you will wait for further instructions.”  
  
  
“My place of work?”  
  
  
“At work tomorrow morning, you will receive further instructions.” she repeats.  
  
  
Alex’s eyes dart around the room. She stands back up again, slowly, clutching the phone in her hand. Her voice is dangerously low as she speaks, her hand reaching for her gun in the nightstand drawer automatically, overtaken by the eerie feeling that she’s being watched. “Do you… know where I work?”  
  
  
“I do know where you work,” Sasha tells her, and Alex feels as if the ground has been swept from underneath her like a rug. “I know everything about you, Alex Danvers.”  
  
  
“I won’t do it. Whatever it is, I won’t do it.” She shakes her head like Sasha can see her.  
  
  
“If you wish to continue your conversation with Samantha Arias, you will wait for further instructions at your place of work tomorrow. If you do not, you may disconnect now.”  
  
  
  
  


* * *

  
   
  
  
Laying in bed, Alex thinks about Ethan’s words for a long time.    
  
  
Throughout the past eight months without Sam, with only the podcast to listen to, _lifeline_ is one of the first words Alex would use to describe what Sam’s voice was to her. It was the only thing that kept her sane when she wasn’t distracted by work or busy trying to take care of Ruby.  
  
  
It was the only thing that helped her breathe again.  
  
  
She shuts her eyes, gritting her teeth so hard that her jaw begins to ache. She can only hope that it won’t be too long before Sasha lets her talk to Sam again, once she waits for further instructions.

**Author's Note:**

> honestly, i wrote this whole chapter on sheer impulse after discovering the podcast yesterday... so i hope it's not too shitty (or confusing?) 
> 
> anyways. i hope you guys liked it! i live for comments and kudos :)


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